Harry in Antarctica, Bertie in Palestine: how princely expeditions are good PR

Today we saw the first images of Prince Harry heading off for the Antarctic as he began his trek to the South Pole with the Walking with Wounded charity. It remains to be seen whether the journalists following the Prince will be able to stomach the predicted temperatures of -45C as the expedition progresses.

The heavily documented journey of one Prince to freezing wasteland reminds me of the journey of another prince 151 years ago – to the boiling deserts of the Middle East. Prince Albert Edward, later Edward VII, at the behest of his parents, spent five months traveling throughout Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, and with him went the first photographer to accompany a Royal tour.

Francis Bedford took more than 200 photographs which are currently on exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in the Palace of Holyrood House. It was on this journey that "Bertie" got himself tattooed in Jerusalem with an inking of five crosses forming a Crusader’s cross on his forearm. I doubt the presence of a tattoo artist in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, but the trips bear a resemblance to each other, as even in 1862 a prince could not escape the demands of the public to see pictures and read stories of their journeys to the ends of the earth.

At the time, there was such a lack of understanding of what was then Ottoman Palestine that the future King had to provide photographs to demonstrate that places like Bethlehem genuinely existed. There is something slightly surreal in the fact that, in the 19th century, your average British subject was using the Bible as their most up-to-date geographical reference book for the Middle East. Mind you, I can’t imagine many of us know much about the South Pole either.

Behind the pretty pictures of Bertie's jovial trip there was a political message. The British government of the time saw the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire approaching and used the Prince of Wales as a diplomat to try and secure a safe route to India should the Ottomans collapse. There's a parallel with today's politics: in the same part of the world, faith in monarchs ranks far above that in any ambassador or politician, and so when the Queen visited the Gulf in 2010 members of her government accompanied her. A monarch or member of a royal family can talk on equal terms with their far-flung royal counterparts, something a politician simply cannot do.

Along with this comes a huge amount of positive PR that is the result of any royal involvement in a project – which is why Walking with Wounded are so grateful for support from Prince Harry. Just as in 1862, the public is intensely curious about daring royal expeditions.